Twitter, a metals warning and why Celtics replays mean no bubble

By Shawn Langlois

The Crimea vote over the weekend was slightly less decisive than Kim Jong Un’s recent 100%-of-the-vote shocker, but the stock market is trying to surprise a little. So far there’s more than enough green to avoid a St. Paddy’s pinch.

Don’t expect volatility to have disappeared, with Fed taper talk on the way and the next chapter in the Ukraine saga unfolding, but for now, a breather is exactly what’s needed. Especially after last week’s bruiser, which was the worst showing for U.S. stocks since January.

By Doug Short’s measure, it was even uglier than that.

In fact, it was the worst week in the past two years, when you take a look at the cumulative toll it took on eight major markets. Together, they lost 3.2%, much worse than the 2.59% they lost in mid-June of 2013. India’s Sensex fared the best, losing only 0.5%, while the Nikkei was the hardest hit, dropping more than 6%.

The quote of the day:“I like to joke that in 2000 here in Boston, Celtics replays were displaced at lunchtime at the greasy spoons by talking heads on TV. You would go to one, and they would be touting the latest Internet stock. But I’ve noticed recently that they are still playing the sports highlights on the televisions in the pubs here.” — Jeremy Grantham on why we’re not in bubble territory.

The economy:Plenty of notable data this week, with existing-home sales and housing starts the highlights. The Fed will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday, and we’ll probably hear about the next tapering step from Yellen and the bunch. As for today, the Empire State manufacturing survey showed a slight improvement in March. The NAHB home-builder survey, and the Fed’s industrial-production and capacity-utilization report are still ahead. Check out Calculated Risk for a look at the entire week.

Investors will tune into what kind of follow-up Castlight Health
/quotes/zigman/29153846/delayed/quotes/nls/csltCSLT has in store for this week after shares of the cloud-based-health-care-software company jumped 149% in their market debut. They’re down just a titch premarket.

The chart of the day:The copper
/quotes/zigman/678457/realtimeHGK4-gold ratio has been plunging, with the former getting hit hard and the latter cashing in nicely on all those geopolitical jitters. This situation tends to signal an imminent drop on the S&P 500 lately, warns Charlie Bilello, director of research at Pension Partners, in this tweet.

The call of the day: Tim Knight of the Slope of Hope blog is NOT a buyer of Twitter
/quotes/zigman/23556538/delayed/quotes/nls/twtrTWTR at these levels. He’s actually looking for single digits. “It’s been consistently the weakest of the ‘social media’ herd, which I think itself is an overvalued sector, so I expect it to be profoundly weak when social-media stocks start falling in general.” Knight added he has “personal experience trying ads on Twitter”, and he ain’t going back He pointed out some other short ideas in his post.

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Need to Know (NTK) guides investors to the most important, insightful items required to chart a course ahead of each trading day. Anchored by lead writer Shawn Langlois, NTK will sift through the fire hose of news, commentary and data, from traditional and non-traditional sources, and extract what’s most essential. You can start reading NTK here as it begins publishing at approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, or sign up here to get a version in your email box every morning at approximately 8:45. a.m. ET.